Print and Print Preview

Editor's Note: The DDOC.DLL is a shareware printing engine provided by BASIC Guru, Don Dickinson. It has functions that allow you to format text in many ways, and you can also print lines, rectangles, ellipses, arcs, pies, bitmaps, and metafiles. The documentation includes an indepth tutorial, as well as instructions for printing labels and other advanced methods. The DLL allows you to give your users a print preview! Eldron Gill has written some really nice demos of this DLL. His files are included with the zip archive of this issue.

• DDOC Software Site
• Online Docs
• Download Free Evaluation Here

Summary of features - as listed on the DDOC home page:

• Allow the programmer to write one routine to create a document for either printing or previewing.
• Drawing calls are provided to print Text, .bmp graphics, Angled Text, Paragraphs of Text, Lines, and Rectangles.
• Each page can be a different size and orientation. Pages may be printed to different paper bins in the printer.
• Pages may have one or more "bookmarks" in them. A list of bookmarks will be displayed at the top of the viewer; if the user clicks on the bookmark in the list, the viewer will jump directly to the page the bookmark refers to.
• Documents can be previewed, printed, stored out and recalled, or deleted automatically after viewing.
• The ability for a document to stand on its own-creation of a self-extracting document-basically a document with an embedded viewer.
• ddoc is thread safe-as many as 20 different documents can be created simultaneously by one program.
• Mailing label generation calls are included for printing mailing labels easily (without calculating page positions) via a preset template. A function is even provided to print a sample sheet of labels from a template.
• The viewer itself is a 32-bit application so use of this engine requires NT4 or Win9x. But it has both a 16-bit and 32-bit call interface that are identical- the engine can be access from either a 16-bit or a 32-bit program (via ddoc16.dll or ddoc32.dll, respectively).
• Header files are included for PB/DLL 1x, 2, 5, 6, PB/CC 1, 2, VB 3, 4, 5, 6, and Delphi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• Faxing and Email of documents on MAPI-compliant system.
• EMail on an internet enabled PC via SMTP and optionally utilizing RAS dialup.

---

'Printer dll Demo
'ddoc Print and Preview Engine
'By Eldron Gill and Colin McMurchie
'Use any way you wish.

'zip file is : LB_ddocDllPrintTrialDemo.zip
'files in zip are:
'DDOC.BMP
'DDOC.EXE
'DDOC32.DLL ' If you use this dll, DDOC.EXE must also be included with your program.
'printing6.bas

' ddoc software site : http://dickinson.basicguru.com/software.htm
' online docs : http://dickinson.basicguru.com/ddoc_manual/index.htm
' download free evaluation here: http://dickinson.basicguru.com/files/tryddoc.exe

' This printer dll demo would not be possible without the help
' of Colin McMurchie who wrote a function that takes an ordinary LB number
' and returns its 32 bit floating point representation as an LB integer.
' Also thanks to Alyce Watson, Brad Moore, and Stefan Pendl.
' Helpful discussions were here:
' http://libertybasic.conforums.com/index.cgi?board=LB3&action=display&num=1082167646

'I'm still not sure i have all the dll calls correct,...but it does give the desired results.
'If any one sees an error in the calls, fix them and share with the rest of us.

'This dll is NOT FREE.  It is Shareware, $25, includes PBDLL source
'The dll will do much more than what is presented here, but this demo gives you a
'little glimpse of it's potential.  In this demo we demonstrate left-aligned text,
'centered text, horizontal line, vertical line, print bmp, and text wrap.
'I like it primarily because you write the code once and you get a preview and the option
'to print all at once.

'Enjoy,
'Eldron

---